"During my trip to Raleigh, I was fortunate to catch up with Iain Gray, vice president of Global Support Services at Red Hat. With my Alfresco hat on, I wanted to find out how Red Hat manages support, and with my CNET hat on, I wanted to share that insight."

OK, Desktop Linux heads, I'm a confessed newbie trying to switch to Linux from XP. My simplyMEPIS install from an ISO went well, but now, on day two, my attempts to install the just-released Firefox update have failed.

"The Software Freedom Law Center's first Annual Legal Summit for Software Freedom October 12 includes a closed private meeting in the morning for key open source attorneys and a series of educational lectures in the afternoon that will be open to other interested lawyers as well as the general public."

Reader-submitted nominations were at the heart of the annual "Linux and Enterprise Open Source Readers' Choice awards," revealed at the recent Enterprise Open Source Conference & Expo 2007 in New York. Notable winners include Ubuntu (Linux distribution), Sendmail (email server), and Evolution (productivity tool), conference organizer SYS-CON Media announced this week.

"I'm a bit mystified by a reference to me in a post that Microsoft's Jason Matusow added to his blog yesterday"

For quite a few pundits out there, the fact that there are so many Linux distributions is a bit troubling to them. I am not sure why this argument keeps coming up, but it goes something like this: there are X Linux distros out there, which is too many to choose from for users, and creates a strain on developer resources.

I decided to conduct an informal poll among Linux users -- including notables like Linus Torvalds -- to see how their platform usage compared with mine.

Optaros has launched its Enterprise Open Source Directory. It is a very good thing, better than a plate of Martha Stewart bran muffins. That is partly because it has listing criteria, including only those projects which are truly enterprise class.